Lightning Rods: Debunked

Don't think I've ever lost anything to lightning in my 3 years yet. And there was a while when literally every second day in my girst summer was a storm.
I do now have a small area with like 15 rods, but I didn't build that until after that first summer

 

I've seen crops disappear here-and-there, but it'd be nice if we would have some kind of message saying what exactly happened to it. There should be, I don't know, a dead plant and examining it should tell you what happened (Crow, it died because it is out of season, lightning, etc).

 

Wow @Xylia. Just wow. That read like an linux elitist screaming that everyone who uses windows is dumb. Being completely closed-minded the the reason people use things like twitter and other social media. Quick and easy communication with a large audience.

Stop trying to preach anti-twitter and why not talk about the topic at hand please?

Given the modding scene essentially needs to decompile the game to work, why not see if they have an answer for the lightning rod's coding. But from what I can see, they don't prevent lightning, just USE it.

 

Yes, that appears to be the case..shame. I am almost tempted to make a bug report about it. I mean, you would think they would protect your crops. The game Don't Starve has a lightning rod and its purpose is to direct lightning towards itself and away from your berry bushes and trees.

 

Yeah, usually to attract and channel lightning through a wire to the ground. Electricity usually likes the easiest and quickest path to the ground.

Funny fact, most churches in the US have them on their roofs. I love the irony of that fact.

 

I don't care if people use Windows, Linux, whatever.... but I DO care when more and more devs keep doing that. The devs that like to hang on twitter more usually use forums less often and as a result, we get less and less information from them.

That's a detriment to the community surrounding said game.

 

While I'm not trying to join in on this, I do agree mostly with Xylia, but not just in the case of twitter. When it comes to something like game development, it's simply a trend of developers taking the 'easy route'. Instead of addressing the players personally, let's just use twitter. Instead of releasing substantial content (Not saying this will happen here) let's release what easily makes us money. Twitter allows for the very baseline, "hype creating" announcements.

It's simply noticing a trend which, imo, is destroying the communities of games.

 

^^
Basically what Blizzard was doing the last couple years I played Warcraft (I quit around March of 2015).

Basically, they'd just let the forums stew in this infinitely growing cesspool of toxicity and occasionally have a Youtube Personality (Lore, after he got hired at Blizzard) jump in and make comments every now and then but otherwise, they'd just let the cesspool churn while claiming they "listen" to the players, while each patch spoke volumes about how they didn't listen to the players.

And then they'd pull some stupid crap like "What you see on forums is a very small minority of what players ACTUALLY want!" ... uh, ok... If they say so.

But yeah, Blizzard is a good case study of how not to manage public relations and it is the number 1 reason why I hate twitter when it comes to video game developers.

If you want how a growing game should manage public relations, I'd point you to Warframe. Okay, DE aren't perfect and they've made mistakes, but they also admit and apologize for these mistakes usually. They don't hide behind twitter accounts (they use one for an in-game mechanic for limited-time missions that pop up, but that's it AFAIK). If they wanna say something, they do it on their official forums last I checked and they have actual people who routinely take part in the community, whether it is the forum moderators, or their famous Community Manager that everybody knows.

It also helps that they do a biweekly hour-long livestream with the top devs that take questions from the community and explain as well as show off upcoming things.

THAT shows you the mark of developers that care about their communities. Not saying CA doesn't care (quite the contrary), but hiding behind twitter loses points in my book.

 

You want to know what I prefer ConcernedApe to be doing? Working on the game.

Can we PLEASE get back on topic?

 

*shrugs* Sorry, I respond to whatever I see in a thread with whatever is in my mind. The moment someone says something new about lightning rods, I'd be happy to talk about it. But nobody has done that yet, soooo.....

 

That's great Pyrii, except the time he spends on tweets he could just aswell spend either here or on the Steam forums, while reaching more of his player base and allowing for people to give proper feedback rather than a message that's half as long as even an SMS used to be and thus can't contain anything even remotely valuable. Nobody wants him to cater to our every whim, double or tripple the time he spends on answering things or anything remotely like that. People are just aghast as to why so many Devs chose to literarely waste the time they do have to spend on the community on something as useless as Twatter.

On topic. This:
Is after a storm. As you can see lightning killed that one tile, despite it being surrounded by 8 lightning rods 6 of which were uncharged including the one directly adjacent to it. They do not appear to offer any kind of protection.

 

Dude, does it, like, take you to 9PM to collect all of that junk or something? Yeesh.

 

No, it's actually surprisingly quick. Collecting aswell as refilling the kegs usually only takes to 1pm or so. That includes the 60~ preservation jars in the greenhouse. There's a proper picture in the farm thread btw.

 

"Only", lol. Ah well, just thought I'd ask hehe.

 

Kinda weird that they don't protect...the lightning should definitely be coded to redirect to an uncharged (or not in the middle of charging) lightning rod before it goes anywhere else, imo.

I watched lightning strike the SAME lightning rod 3 times in a single day (it was charging after the first one, of course) as I worked around my farm the other day.

They should honestly help protect your crops from lightning, though I suspect that IS the case...it's just that it's probably not perfect.

I don't think real lightning rods are perfect, either...though it's definitely MUCH better to have them than not to have them. ^^


Either way, it seems kinda silly not to have them anyway, at least for when a storm is coming. It's free money after the initial investment, after all...and I want those battery packs for my lamp posts!

 

This. I knew there was something I couldn't put my finger on.

 

What's even worse: It appears to target more than just crops. Twice now, I've woken up the day after a storm to find that some of my crops were unwatered...because one of my sprinklers was destroyed. That's...rather scary.

 

Yeah, it seems to also hit beehouses and kegs. Not sure about chests but it could explain why some people are reporting chests as missing on the bug forums on steam.

 

...Ugh...that's horrible, especially if it happens to be a darn IRIDIUM sprinkler.

 

At least those are easy to replace. I find it particularly infuriating when I have a nice, organized group of tapped maple trees, and some of them get blasted by lightning. It will take forever to have a nice number of maple syrup per harvest again.